Economy

The chaos has been compared to the 2014 thriller film The Purge, where people take advantage of the absence of law and order to carry out horrific crimes.

With officers staging a walk-out over conditions and wages, thugs are running riot, with people running rampant with guns and machetes, shops being robbed, buses set on fire and dead bodies are left lying in the street.

Most alarming is the prospect this data has been incomplete since the war on terrorism began in October 2001. If that is the case, it would fundamentally undermine confidence in much of what the Pentagon has disclosed about its prosecution of these wars, prompt critics to call into question whether the military sought to mislead the American public, and cast doubt on the competency with which other vital data collection is being performed and publicized. Those other key metrics include American combat casualties, taxpayer expense and the military’s overall progress in degrading enemy capabilities.

There are three crucial reasons why the silver price will outperform the gold price when the highly inflated paper markets disintegrate under the weight of massive debt and derivatives. While many precious metals investors are frustrated by the ability of the Fed and Central Banks to continue to prop up the markets, the longer they postpone the day of reckoning, the worse the collapse.

Applied to the U.S. as a country, investors borrow cheaply in the U.S., and seek higher returns by investing in the rest of the world. In the investment world, we also refer to this as carry, i.e. one might say the U.S. engages in an amazing carry trade. As long as this ‘carry trade’ works, it is quite a charm. That said, there are those who are concerned that the party cannot last forever. To quote from our own past writings, the former head of the European Central bank Wim Duisenberg said in 2003: ‘We hope and pray the global adjustment process will be slow and gradual." -- In fact, a reference to a "disorderly adjustment of global imbalances" was a risk cited by the ECB every month in its statement until about the time current head, Draghi, took over. This "adjustment process" is a thinly veiled reference to a potential dollar crash.’

So yes, both gasoline stocks and supply remains at extremely high levels, but what set off alarm bells is not supply, but demand: the EIA last week reported that the 4-week average of gasoline supplied - or implied gasoline demand - in the United States was 8.2 million barrels per day, the lowest since February 2012. And, as Reuters adds, U.S. refiners are now facing the prospects of weakening gasoline demand for the first time in five years.

While reduced OPEC production for January has seemed to support higher oil prices, reports of OPEC’s accomplishments have lost some sway in recent weeks in the wake of the American Petroleum Institute and the Energy Information Administration reports, which have both reported weeks of builds for crude oil, along with Baker Hughes, which showed that US drillers are putting rigs into production at rates not seen since mid-2014 before the oil price crash began.

So Karl, the former head of the NOAA office that produces climate data, worked with a team of scientists to challenge the IPCC findings and prove that the hiatus did not exist. He claimed to have developed a way to raise sea-temperature readings that had been collected by buoys: He would adjust them by using higher temperature readings of sea water collected by ships. “In regards to sea surface temperature, scientists have shown that across the board, data collected from buoys are cooler than ship-based data,” said one of the study’s co-authors. It was therefore necessary, the NOAA scientists held, to “correct the difference between ship and buoy measurements, and we are using this in our trend analysis.”

From his father’s porch, the 56-year-old can see the windswept spot where his great-grandparents’ sod house stood in 1902 when they planted the first of the 1,200 acres on which his family farms alfalfa, sorghum and wheat today. Even after harvesting one of their best wheat crops ever last year, thanks to plentiful rain and a mild winter, Mr. Scott isn’t sure how long they can afford to keep farming that ground.

Gold & Silver

Article suggestions for the Daily Digest can be sent to [email protected]. All suggestions are filtered by the Daily Digest team and preference is given to those that are in alignment with the message of the Crash Course and the "3 Es."

The number of countries assigned the top 'AAA' rating by credit ratings agency Fitch has slunk to a 13-year low with no improvement expected in the coming two years. Only eleven countries currently hold the coveted highest rating which compares to a ...

Greece is still drowning in debt as the International Monetary Fund has warned that its debts are on an "explosive" path. Despite years of attempted austerity and economic reforms, the European Union is still facing a crisis due to the debt that Greece...

Germany's central bank is bringing home gold reserves stored in places like New York and Paris faster than planned, it said on Thursday, as confidence in the euro ebbs even in the heart of the currency bloc after a decade of a sluggish economy. Stashed ...

A record $2 trillion of U.S. corporate debt comes due in the next five years, Moody's Investors Service said Wednesday. That's potentially challenging for industries with the heaviest debt loads, including telecom and energy, but is softened by ...

The economic credibility of the Liberal-National West Australian government has been dealt a deep blow just a month out from the state election, with Treasury wiping out any return to surplus and tipping net debt will pass $40 billion for the first ...

The future of Greece in the euro zone is once again in doubt as creditors and Athens cannot agree on debt relief for the troubled economy. The outspoken German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble told the German broadcaster ARD that in order to cut its ...

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on Wednesday brought back the Grexit issue by saying that unless Greece implements reforms it cannot stay in the euro zone. The German finance minister spoke to the country's broadcaster ARD in light of the ...

BERLIN Greece should leave the euro zone and then be given debt relief, the head of Germany's pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) told a German radio station on Thursday. Greece should, however, remain in the European Union, FDP leader Christian ..

The article certainly is frightening enough if it is accurate in its assessment... and therein lies the question. I would love it if Chris, or others with expertise in this area (Dogs, where are you?) to pitch in and give your take on this.

Sounds like maybe I tell my elderly mother that we won't be buying her canned Pacific red salmon anymore...

China's three biggest bitcoin exchanges took steps to prevent withdrawals of the cryptocurrency amid pressure from the nation's central bank to clamp down on capital outflows. BTC China subjected all bitcoin withdrawals to a 72-hour review, while Huobi ...

The Rome government is set to take a 70 percent stake in the bank, pumping 6.6 billion euros to fill the bulk of an 8.8. billion euros capital deficit. The rest of the money will come from the forced conversion of subordinated bonds into shares. But ...

Authorities in the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo threatened striking police officers with criminal charges on Friday as the federal government sent in more troops in a bid to end a week of violent anarchy that has left more than 120 people dead.

Espirito Santo is one of several Brazilian states grappling with a budget crisis that is crippling essential public services for millions of citizens. The police strike over the past week, over pay, has left a security vacuum and led to rampant assaults, heists and looting, often in broad daylight.

Limited protests by police in nearby Rio de Janeiro alarmed many residents of the teeming city of 12 million people, many of whom live in fear of violence between rival drug gangs spilling out of hillside slums.

A spokesman for the local police union in Espirito Santo said the death toll from a week of unrest had risen to 122. Many of the dead are believed to come from rival criminal gangs, according to police.

State officials have not officially confirmed the number of dead.

If accurate, the toll would be more than six times the homicide rate in the state last year.

President Michel Temer's government said late on Thursday that hundreds more soldiers and federal police would be sent in to help stem the chaos, focused mostly in the metropolitan region of Vitoria, the state capital.

The Three E's predicaments and problems are challenging our health, standard of living and even survival. This trend, which is NOT limited to St. Paul, implies we won't be getting much help from government schools toward addressing The Three E's for the foreseeable future.

In the Obama years, America’s public education system embarked on a vast social experiment that threatened to turn schools into educational free-fire zones. The campaign—carried out in the name of “racial equity”—sought to reduce dramatically the suspension rate of black students, who get referred for discipline at much higher rates than other students. From the top down, the U.S. Department of Education drove the effort; from the bottom up, local educational bureaucrats have supported and implemented it.

“Racial equity” has become the all-purpose justification for dubious educational policies. Equity proponents view “disparate impact”—when the same policies yield different outcomes among demographic groups—as conclusive proof of discrimination. On the education front, “equity” does not seek equal treatment for all students. Instead, it demands statistical equivalence in discipline referrals and suspensions for students of every racial group, regardless of those students’ actual conduct.

Equity advocates’ central premise is that teachers, not students, are to blame for the racial-equity discipline gap. They claim that teachers’ biases, cultural ignorance, or insensitivity are the gap’s primary causes. The key to eliminating disparities, they maintain, is to change not students’ but adults’ behavior. Equity supporters justify their agenda on grounds that the racial-equity discipline gap severely hampers black students’ chances of success in life. Kids who get suspended generally fail to graduate on time and are more likely to get caught up in the juvenile-justice system, they say.

President Obama’s Department of Education made racial equity in school discipline one of its top priorities. “The undeniable truth is that everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise,” according to Arne Duncan, who served as education secretary until early 2016. “It is adult behavior that must change,” Duncan stated repeatedly. “The school-to-prison pipeline must be challenged every day.”

If you are fortunate enough not to live in St. Paul (or any other urban area where these concepts have been implemented, like I have in Philadelphia), read on to discover the chaos and violence that resulted directly from these dubious concepts and social engineering.

The American government school system generally isn't helping address the issues we study here at PeakProsperity. They're adding another collapsing bubble to our list of woes and robbing us of potential help (the younger generation).

And in case you're wondering, the same basic principles have been applied to law enforcement for at least the last 8 years. That is, we've been told that if blacks are arrested, prosecuted and jailed at any significant rate above their representation in the overall population then the reason is racism and it must be changed. So, for example, if blacks represent 73% of those arrested for violent crimes but they are only 40% of the population of the city, then the police are racists and must be restrained. It matters not, for instance, that victims (of all races) report to the police that their perpetrators were black 80% of the time. The decline in law and order will continue as long as these values and concepts hold sway. Prepare accordingly.